Category — sux

Sensationalist title I know but I work, at least for the minute, for a newspaper company that’s just been bought out. Now I’m fairly sure that our new corporate overlords will have no requirement for two web development departments. Meaning at least one of us is for the chop and they are the larger company buying the smaller one, so centralising to their own resources seems likely to be the way they’ll go.

We have a strong development team here, with a great work ethic, who all love working with modern (enlightened) Perl. However only a cursory look at the Jobs market around our location shows us that there aren’t very many openings for experienced Perl developers. Sure there are some around London, but outside of the big bad city there seems to be very few and for most of us relocating simply isn’t an option due to family commitments.

So being that we’re all competent developers switching to a different language isn’t a massive issue to us from a technical point of view but we’ve given some of the best years of our lives to Perl and the community surrounding it. Abandoning it, even only on a professional level, seems like it’s almost more gut-wrenching than the likely ensuing redundancies.

So is this the death of Perl for me/us? Perhaps and it’s gutting.

Heh, check out this error. I upgraded MySQL to version 5 on a server at work then some things (note not everything) decided to stop working when connecting through Perl. After some googling I discovered sweet fa. I decided to check the DBD/mysql.pm files manually and discovered that there were actually two of them! When I installed the new driver it had installed it to a different location than the old one, so it didn’t overwrite it. Some Perl scripts were loading the old one and giving the error below.

table tree connect failed -- install_driver(mysql) failed: DBD::mysql object version 4.004 does not match bootstrap parameter 3.0002 at /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.7/i686-linux/DynaLoader.pm line 253.

I removed the old DBD folder and all was well again. No pressure at all considering a large commerce site was down during all of this!

I’m definitely an advocate of Internet shopping, however if anyone ever wants to purchase any technical gear I can certainly recommend not going to Dabs. One description for them that certainly springs to mind is an utter shower of sh*te. I placed an order for a dual tuner free view PVR unit from them on the 23rd January. I’ve still not received it. It is apparently with the couriers who are saying they can’t find my address and that I need to take it up with Dabs. Well contacting Dabs is nigh on impossible. I’ve emailed them with no responses. They don’t publish their phone numbers, I managed to find one from the couriers, but that just gave me an automated response, I used there live support system and was told to email them again. To say the least I’m a little peed off. Grrrr…. I just hope that this PVR unit is worth the wait!

Okay, so we have a table with columns A B C D in. A B C D each line in the table is unique and D is an integer. I need to find all the unique permutations of A B C with the minimum value of D. Not too hard you might think, a simple multiple group by and a MIN function. Only problem is that the table is actually 25+ columns, with 25 million rows. The simple multiple group by, now takes days to run….

I want to cry…

Anyone with any ideas please comment!!

Here my raw… I’m aware i’ve commented on this previously, but OpenPBX is not ready for mass consumption. I’ve now been in work 7 days straight thanks to the delightful phone system, and it’s still at my house! As far I can tell it’s massively unstable. It’s crashed a number of times doing nothing more complicated than making a call! Transfering calls seems to be totally impossible over SIP.

Tried to register my bike as off the road, but as per usual these new fangled computer thingies chose not to work and decided not to recognise my “document reference number”. So I called up the automated telephone service, which also decided it didn’t love me. So now I have to find time to trek down to the post office and do it, or otherwise as the adverts keep reminding me, recieve an £80 fine.